The Caliphate or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has advanced across the Middle East. Capturing large areas of territory and arms from Iraq and seizing areas in Syria’s civil war stricken landmass, the brutal 7th century Jihadists wreak terror and devastation on every place they go. Using internet technology and web-savvy technicians they place videos of their horrific executions of hostages and prisoners. The United States self-proclaimed “coalition” managed piecemeal attacks and bombed pickup trucks and expressed insincere condolences when American hostages were beheaded. The President then hurried to get in a round of golf.

When a captured Jordanian pilot was executed in a most inhuman and cruel way, videoed for his grieving family and countrymen to see, Jordan’s King Abdullah cut off the courtesy visit to the White House.He declared vengeance and thenthe world saw that he meant it. The King, a former pilot in the Royal Jordanian Air Force, ordered heavy air strikes against Caliphate targets and led the attack himself. No insincere, teleprompter speeches, no golf game, the Jihadists felt his wrath and that of Jordan.

The other day 21 Egyptian Christians were marched in ceremonial manner in a cruel ritual along the ocean front in Libya and beheaded by Caliphate brutes. The video was broadcast worldwide to continue the war of intimidation against all who would oppose them. Many Egyptian Christians have gone to Libya to work. The “Arab Spring” revolutions aided and abetted by a malevolent US State Department had overturned a Government in Libya that at least was cooperative. President al-Sisi of Egypt a former General in the Army immediately issued a statement that Egypt would defend and avenge the lives of its citizens, Christians and all others. The strong words were backed up by strong actions and heavy air attacks.

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Israel has held off enemies from all directions since 1948. The War of Independence saw Egypt and Jordan as attackers and again in 1973. But by 1979 a wise President of Egypt who had helped lead the Yom Kippur attack decided that it was time for peace. A treaty of peace was signed between Egypt and President Anwar Sadat and Israel and Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The treaty has held and has made both nations stronger allies.

Jordan as well came to realize the futility of war and the benefits of Peace. In 1994 Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan concluded a treaty and began trade discussions. Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has known war as a soldier and respects his former adversaries; it is doubtful if he ever dismissed them as “junior varsity”. A wise soldier respects his enemy and learns his ways. Only arrogant back- seaters who never hear gunfire dismiss a foe with insults and empty words.

Today as the United States hesitates, dithers and confuses its current allies, three former enemies have found common ground and taken decisive action to defend their nations against a brutal enemy who means death and destruction to their way of life and liberties. A real coalition of forces sworn to protect their peoples and lands from an oppressive and sadistic enemy has formed from former enemies. Their warrior Prime Minister, King and President-General have known battle, led and faced fire. Their word is their bond and their loyalty has grown. Perhaps this is the way to overcome The Caliphate and end its world conquest and sadistic ways. The Jihadists do not surrender, they execute prisoners of all beliefs short of their own. The best response to their ways is force not empty words and a game of golf. Israel made peace with enemies and they became allies in a war no one can lose. We must all respect the honor and bravery of these leaders as they take the war to the enemy.

The Zion Mule Corps saw action in the Gallipolis Campaign in April of that year. Together with the first British, Australian, New Zealand and French troops the corps landed on the peninsula on April 25th. There they met with heavy shelling and machine-gun fire at the shore of Cape Helles. During the engagement, Trumpeldor who was second in command, and who had earlier lost his left arm while fighting in the Russian Army in 1902 at Port Arthur against the Japanese, was shot in the shoulder. Writing later of the event Patterson reported: “Many of the Zionists whom I thought somewhat lacking in courage showed themselves fearless to a degree when under heavy fire, while Captain Trumpeldor actually revelled in it, and the hotter it became the more he liked it…” Jabotinsky served as an officer and a young man who served with the rank of corporeal was named David Gruen, later to become David Ben Gurion and the first Prime Minister of Israel.

In an interview with the British Jewish Chronicle later that year, Patterson said: “These brave lads who had never seen shellfire before most competently unloaded the boats and handled the mules whilst shells were bursting in close proximity to them … nor were they in any way discouraged when they had to plod their way to Seddul Bahr, walking over dead bodies while the bullets flew around them … for two days and two nights we marched … thanks to the ZMC the 29th Division did not meet with a sad fate, for the ZMC were the only Army Service Corps in that part of Gallipolli at that time.” Of the 300 men who saw action under Patterson, 14 were killed. The remaining fighters had been assigned to the Australian and New Zealand forces who had discourteously refused to fight with them sending them back to Egypt.

Later in the war, in the summer of 1917, a Jewish Legion was formed mostly of Jewish volunteers from the US and Canada including some British members. At that time Patterson was promoted to full Colonel and given command of the 38th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, one of three battalions that made up the Legion.

In February of 1918 Patterson had the honor of leading the 38th Fusiliers Battalion along with the other two battalions of the Jewish Legion, in a parade through Whitechapel Road as they were being shipped off to fight in Palestine. They were loudly applauded by the Jews of London as other bystanders looked on in amazement.

Although initially, because of anti-Semitism the British commanders in Palestine kept the Legion from fighting, in June of 1918 the force was brought from Egypt and sent to relieve the Grenadier Guards in Jaljulya. They were then attached to the 60th division and sent to the Jordan valley where they became a key element within the British line along the Melhallah rift. On September 19th they crossed the Jordan at Umm Es Shert and held Es Salt in what later became Transjordan.

“I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”(Genesis 12:3)
On November 10th the remains of Lt.-Col. John Henry Patterson and those of his wife Frances (“Francie”) Helena were interred at Moshav Avihayil in central Israel, near Netanya, where many of the men he commanded are buried.

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Although a true Zionist, Lt.-Col. Patterson’s fame goes back even farther than his exploits in the creation of a Jewish Legion to when as an engineer working in Kenya in 1898–99, on the railway bridge over the Tsavo River, he singlehandedly cleared the area of man eating lions. The details of this are recorded in his book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo (1907) and graphically presented in the 1996 Paramount film The Ghost and the Darkness, in which he is portrayed by actor Val Kilmer. (Wikipedia) The lions had been attacking and eating members of his workforce as well as local villagers and his expertise at taking out the wild beasts (often with a single shot) gained him great fame among the natives.

Dealing with lions proved to be good training for what lay ahead. With the advent of World War I, Patterson became involved in the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight the Ottomans in Turkey. At that time, pre-State Israel was under the authority of the Ottoman government in Turkey. Any hope at statehood lay in defeating that government which had already proved resistant to Zionist hopes for a Jewish homeland as proven by the Turkish Sultan’s rebuff of requests by the leading Zionist and head of the World Zionist Organization, Theodore Herzl. Herzl met with Sultan Abdulhamid II offering to pay off the Turkish national debt in exchange for a homeland in Palestine. The Sultan refused the offer.

In the face of such intransigence on the part of the Ottomans, with the advent of World War I the Zionists shifted their hopes to the British, which allied with France was fighting the Central Powers which included both Germany and Turkey. In this context those such as Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky who supported a military solution, wished to form a Jewish Legion and fight with the Allies.

Patterson was in favor of forming a Jewish Legion to fight with British forces but he met with a strong tradition of anti-Semitism within the British military. His experience in dealing with this is best described by a dedication found in a copy of Patterson’s book, With The Judeans In The Palestine Campaign by British Jewish author and Zionist, Israel Zangwell in which he says, “In making acquaintance with my friend, Colonel Patterson, Canada will become acquainted with one of the bravest of living soldiers and one of the boldest of living hunters. But the heroism he has displayed in the jungle or on the battlefield is eclipsed by the courage he has shown spiritually in championing and defending the Jews, to whom he is bound neither by race nor by religion. It was he who led and inspired the Jewish forces in Gallipoli and Palestine, it is to him—doughty with pen as with sword—that the world is indebted for the knowledge of their achievements, it is to his chivalry that we owe the assertion of their claims and the record of their grievances. A man of the simplest and most lovable character, imperturbable, breezy, hopeful and humorous, a crusader in a truly Christian spirit, whose aim is to restore Palestine not to Christendom, but to the only homeless people on earth. Colonel Patterson has written his name indelibly on the scroll of Jewish as well as British history.”

“I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”(Genesis 12:3)
On November 10th the remains of Lt.-Col. John Henry Patterson and those of his wife Frances (“Francie”) Helena were interred at Moshav Avihayil in central Israel, near Netanya, where many of the men he commanded are buried.

Now the spirit of this great lover of Zion rests with those he fought with so boldly as part of Israel’s first organized fighting units, the Zion Mule Corps and Jewish Legion which saw service as a part of the British army in World War I at the battle of the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey and in the Jordan Valley, fighting the Ottoman Turks.

Not unlike the great humanitarian Oskar Schindler, the German Catholic who risked his life to save 1200 Jews during World War II and the Holocaust, Patterson too was a non-Jew, raised in an Irish Catholic home, who became a dedicated Christian Zionist and who is credited with being a central figure in the formation of the early Jewish defense force in pre-State Israel.

With such figures as Zeev Jabotinsky, the founder of Etzel, the Irgun Tzvai Leumi the rightwing pre-State political movement that fought the British and called on European Jewry to immigrate to Mandate Palestine before the Holocaust, and Zionist activist and military fighter Joseph Trumpeldor, Patterson formed the Jewish Legion which fought valiantly in the first world war. Jabotinsky is quoted as saying of Patterson, “Never in Jewish history has there been in our midst a Christian friend of his understanding and devotion.”
“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love thee.” (Psalm 122:6)

Lt.-Col. Patterson was a true Christian Zionist who saw in the Jewish people’s longing for a homeland the fulfillment of Bible prophecy in his time. Patterson was born on the 10th of November 1867, in Forgney, Ballymahon, County Westmeath, Ireland, to a Protestant father and Roman Catholic mother. At the age of 17 (lying about his age but looking older than his years) he joined the British Army and rose quickly through the ranks reaching the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

Lt.-Col. Patterson fought in the Boer War and subsequently WWI. In his later years he moved to California with his wife Francie and died there seven years later. During his lifetime he maintained a close friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Ben-Zion who was a member of the Irgun (Etzel) and its historian. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s older brother Lt.-Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, who was the commander of the elite Israeli army commando unit Sayeret Matkal and who was the sole causality at the 1976 Entebbe raid which he commanded, was named after him.

In commemoration of the interment of Lt.-Col. Patterson’s ashes in his beloved Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote in a letter to all those involved: “Lt.-Col. Patterson was one of the founders of the Jewish Legion, the first Jewish military force since the Bar Kochba Revolt and the basis upon which the IDF was established. My parents always spoke warmly of Lt.-Col. Patterson, who worked alongside my father in the 1940s in the US to promote the Zionist idea. When my older brother was born, my father called him Yonatan [Jonathan] after Lt.-Col. Patterson and my grandfather Natan. Lt.-Col. Patterson attended Yoni’s circumcision and gave him a silver cup engraved with the words ‘To my beloved godson Yonatan from Lt.-Col. John Henry Patterson.’ This was a link between the commander of the renewed Jewish force and one of the future military commanders of the State of Israel.”
To be continued …

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